|
Introduction Theatre from the Arab World, almost unknown to English language scholars and readers two decades ago, is gradually coming to be recognized as an important part of the world dramatic heritage. The Routledge World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre devotes an invaluable full volume to the Arab World, and three English-language anthologies provide a modest but important sampling of the rich theatrical fare available in this hitherto neglected part of the world of drama. The first of these, the truly pioneering collection, Arabic Writing Today: The Drama, was published as early as 1977 by the American Research Center in Cairo. It performed a most praiseworthy service in making such work available for the first time to English readers, but given the potential field, its range of selections was extremely narrow. Eight of the nine plays it contained were from Egypt, and the other from Syria. There is no disputing the dominance of Egypt in the history of
the modern Arab theatre, but given the geographical and cultural
range of that theatre, this volume gives an extremely narrow picture
of its subject. Two more recent collections present a much more
extended and thus more accurate representation of the modern
Arabic drama. The first, Modern Arabic Drama, appeared in 1995 as
part of the Indiana University series in Arab and Islamic Studies.
Again, Egypt held a deserved first place, contributing four out of the
twelve plays in this collection, but the rest presented a commendable
geographic sampling, with three works from Syria, and one each
from Iraq, Tunisia, Lebanon, Palestine, and Kuwait. A second Although naturally these collections represent only a very small
part of the dramatic material available from the Arab world, one
very important part of that world remains seriously underrepresented
in English translation, and that is the substantial theatre
tradition of Western North Africa, the region known to Arabs as the
Maghreb. In Arabic, Maghreb means “place where the sun sets” and
is opposed to the much less commonly encountered term Mashriq,
the “place where the sun rises.” The Mashriq refers to what
Westerners call the Middle East and sometimes the Orient as well,
while the Maghreb, according to the narrowest definition, includes
the three Northwest African countries bordered by the Atlas Although all three of the core Maghreb nations have a significant modern drama tradition, their virtual exclusion from the existing anthologies is doubtless due in part to geography and in part to language. Geographically, they are, at least in the Arabic-speaking world, the countries most remote from Egypt and Syria, the centers of the modern Arabic theatre. Linguistically their dramatic tradition shares the tensions of theatrical expression throughout the Arab world, but in a form that adds to their marginalization in international scholarly study of the drama. In all three countries, Arabic is the official language and is spoken by the vast majority of the population, with various Berber languages taking a distinct second place. French is a distant third, but it remains in all three countries basic to much economic, political, and cultural activities. From the beginning of the modern era, Maghreb dramatists, like those elsewhere in the Arab world, have wrestled with the linguistic tension within Arabic itself. Traditional Arabic poetic expression remained close to the classical Arabic of the Koran, but this generally seemed stilted and artificial in the theatre, and today most Arabic dramatists, including those in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, write in a style fairly close to the Arabic spoken in their own communities, even when this means that their plays may be very difficult for Arabic speakers in other countries to understand. Playwrights from the Berber populations have another, more serious problem. Although there is a small, and growing, amount of Berber drama, and words or passages in various Berber languages often find their way into basically Arabic plays, a dramatist whose native language is a Berber one can only hope to gain a reputation by writing in one of two foreign languages, Arabic or French. Usually, like Algeria’s Kateb Yacine, they select French. French is, however, also the language often selected by Arabic speaking dramatists in these countries, and many of the best-known dramatists of the Maghreb, including the four represented in this volume, have created their dramatic works, wholly or in part, in that language. Although most of the leading dramatists of Egypt, for example, have some fluency in English, and the leading Egyptian dramatist of the late twentieth century, Alfred Farag, in fact lived in London, an Egyptian dramatist would scarcely think of writing a play in English, while French is the preferred language for many leading dramatists in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Given the troubled colonial history of this region, and especially of Algeria, this choice might seem surprising, but there are a number of reasons for this, even for dramatists who, unlike those of a Berber background, could as easily write in Arabic as French. This phenomenon has been addressed by a number of Maghreb
authors, and one of the most comprehensive analyses of their choice
of French has been provided by the Tunisian poet Tahar Bekri in an
essay entitled “Ecrire en Français au Maghreb” (Writing in French in
the Maghreb). He begins by noting that the colonial tradition
remains a powerful one, especially in Algeria, where from 1830 to
1962 only French was taught in the schools and for more than a
century the literary tradition was entirely a French one. This Bekri notes a number of other reasons for a special interest in
French in the Maghreb, however. First, unlike Francophone or
mixed-language writers in, for example, Belgium or Quebec, the
Maghreb author using French is not resisting a dominant language
but utilizing the “language of the Other” to achieve certain cultural
or literary effects. The range of linguistic expression offered by
choosing or mixing local Arabic, literary Arabic, Berber, and French
gives the Maghreb writer a challenging palette of linguistic
possibilities. The different if complementary literary traditions also
allow such dramatists to decide if they wish to present a love story,
for example, in the very different terms of French or Arabic
literature. On a less positive note, the possibility of political, or more
recently religious, censorship has sometimes encouraged Maghreb
dramatists to publish possibly troubling works in French and indeed
in France. Finally, and I suggest most importantly in the case of
theatre, writing in French offers to the Maghreb author the
possibility of an international reputation that would not be possible
for work written in the local tongue. Nor is this only a matter of
one’s international reputation. There is enough post-colonial
residue even in the United States that many young American
dramatists or experimental companies have not attracted serious
critical attention until they have been presented in Europe, and Thus, both geography and linguistics have worked to marginalize Maghreb theatre for those relatively few scholars who have opened the modern study of Arabic drama. This marginalization is clearly reflected in the three current anthologies of Arabic drama in English, although their presentation has usually neither admitted nor explained this tradition’s lack of representation. The introduction to the most recent collection, Short Arabic Plays, for example, begins: “Interlink is here presenting a collection of twenty short plays, nineteen in English translation and one in original English, written by sixteen Arab playwrights . . . from various Arab states.” While this is true, it does not acknowledge that only Arabic language plays (except for the one English example) have been included. The reader is thus given no warning that there are a substantial number of other “Arab playwrights” in other “Arab states,” who are not represented because their work is not actually written in Arabic, or because their Arabic is apparently too remote, linguistically or geographically. This is all the more surprising since one English-language play is included, undermining the presumed even if unstated dedication to only Arabic language drama. This ignorance of or indifference to the drama of the Maghreb is unfortunately commonly found not only in standard anthologies but even in standard histories and reference works. A striking example is the section on “Arabic Drama Since the Thirties” in the Modern Arabic Literature volume of the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature. This essay is written by M. M. Badawi, also editor of this volume and unquestionably the leading modern authority on Arabic theatre writing in English. Badawi’s forty-five-page essay devotes only two pages to Tunisian theatre, one paragraph to Algeria, and two short paragraphs to Morocco. The treatment of Algeria, with its substantial dramatic repertoire in both French and Arabic, is particularly uninformed. From the beginning, Badawi asserts,“Algerian intellectuals were too much taken up with French culture” to give Arabic drama any encouragement, while the general public“did not much like literary drama,” preferring the “Algerian national dramatic entertainment, which was a mixture of song, laughter, and improvised scenes.” He cites two dramatists as in his opinion the only Algerian “men of the theatre,” Kateb Yacine and Kaki Wil Abd al-Rahman, both of whom had to “bow to popular demand” and give up writing “well-constructed plays.” The“younger generation,” of unnamed dramatists, have given up playwriting, according to Badawi, in favor of collective authorship and improvisation. In fact, Kaki’s experiments with traditional forms were of enormous importance and influenced a whole generation of Maghreb playwrights, while Yacine, like Abdelkar Alloulah, whom Badawi does not even mention, has an international reputation as one of the leading dramatists from the Arab world in the late twentieth century. This marginalization of a significant part of Arabic drama even by Arabic scholars is all the more unfortunate because the Francophone theatre of the Maghreb is similarly marginalized by English-language scholars interested in French-language theatre. Only in very recent years has the study of Francophone literature, French literature produced outside of France, become an important part of French studies in England and America, and although French-language plays from Canada, the Caribbean, and sub- Saharan Africa have been translated into English and some at least are becoming increasingly well known, the dramatic work of the Maghreb still remains almost unknown in English translation. This is the case even though the leading dramatists of this region are in many cases known and produced in France itself. So far, the study of Francophone theatre in Africa has been devoted almost exclusively to sub-Saharan Africa, once again ignoring or marginalizing the major cultural world of the Maghreb, which does fit the easy totalizing Western idea of “African theatre.” Thus, John Conteh-Morgan’s 1994 Theatre and Drama in Francophone Africa, at this point the basic English text on this subject, is quite devoid of any mention of the rich Francophone theatre of the Maghreb. French scholarship is no better. M. Fiangon Rogo Koffi’s even more recent (2002) Le Théâtre Africain Francophone is not much better on this score. It discusses the work of more than one hundred Francophone dramatists in Africa, only five of which come from the Maghreb (three from Algeria and two from Morocco). There are more dramatists discussed from Madagascar than from the entire Maghreb. The only significant study of the theatre of this region readily available is Laura Chakravarty Box’s excellent and groundbreaking 2005 Strategies of Resistance in the Dramatic Texts of North African Women. The present volume is planned to help alleviate this neglect and to introduce the important theatrical culture of the Maghreb to English-language readers. It includes translations from four of the best-known and most-honored dramatists of this region, two from Algeria and one each from Morocco and Tunisia. Before speaking briefly of their specific careers, a quick overview of the modern dramatic tradition of the Maghreb may be useful. Although both a live performance tradition and a thriving shadow-puppet theatre can be traced back for many centuries in many parts of the Arabic world, Arabic theatre in the European style was, not surprisingly, a product of the colonial period. For many years, the modern Arabic theatre was said to have begun with the production in 1847 of Marun Al-Naqqash’s al-Bakhil (The Miser) in Beirut. Despite the title, the work was not, as has sometimes been claimed, an adaptation of Molière’s play, but a staging of several popular stories in a European dramatic style. Recently, Shmuel Moreh and Philip Sadgrove have discovered an equally early Algerian play that combines elements of traditional Arabic live performance with European practice, Abraham Daninos’s Nazahat al-Mishtaq wa-Ghussat al-Ushshaq fi Madinat Tiryaq fi’l-Iraq (The Pleasure Trip of the Enamoured and the Agony of Lovers in the City of Tiryaq in Iraq). This was the first play in Arabic to be published (in Algiers in 1847) anywhere in the Arab world, the next not appearing until some twenty-six years later, in 1863 in Beirut. Despite this early start, European-style theatre in the Arabic language did not develop in the late nineteenth century in the Maghreb as it did in Egypt and Syria. Instead, such theatre was confined to productions in French or Spanish, presented by amateur actors from the foreign-language communities for soldiers and the early European settlers in these countries. A large theatre was built in Algiers as early as 1853 by the French government and a Spanish theatre in Tetouan in Morocco about ten years later, but their public was essentially, if not entirely, a European one. The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 featured an “Algerian and Tunisian village,” the only specific buildings of which mentioned in the Fair’s official guidebook were a “truly Oriental . . . Algerian theatre, seating six hundred persons” and a Tunisian, holding three hundred. The theatrical fare of these theatres, however, was primarily belly dancers, one of the biggest attractions of the Fair. The next phase of theatrical activity in this region came early in the twentieth century, as a part of the cultural renaissance called al- Nahda (Awakening) centered in Egypt. Colonial theatre for the colonials continued, at such sites as the Spanish Theatre Cervantes, built in Tangier in 1913, the French Masrah al-Balady (Public Theatre) built in Casablanca in 1922, the Rossini Theatre (1903), and Municipal Theatre (1909) in Tunis. At the same time, however, the Maghreb was visited by touring theatrical companies from Egypt, which provided examples of an Arabic-language theatre that could participate in the general cultural awakening taking place at this time. From around 1910 onward, first Tunisia, then Algeria, welcomed a series of such companies, which in turn inspired local theatrical companies to form, especially around the universities. In Tunisia, ach-Chahama (Gallantry) was formed by Tunisian and Egyptian amateurs as early as 1910, and Algiers saw the founding of the first and most important such group, the Society of Muslim Students, in 1919. Professional Arabic-language touring companies first appeared in Morocco in 1923, from both Tunisia and Egypt. Members of one of these companies remained in Marrakesh and established a company there in 1924. During the 1920s and 1930s, largely under the influence of the touring Egyptian companies, small companies were formed and a number of plays, some in classical Arabic and others in the local dialect, were formed in the Maghreb. Tunisia was particularly active, with a dozen or so ongoing companies operating in Tunis. Female directors, headed by Wassila Sabri, began to appear in the late 1920s as part of a growing interest in Tunisia in female equality. By the 1940s, a number of specifically women’s companies had been organized, with all roles played by women. Although a wide variety of dramas, comedies, and musicals were produced by these companies, Mahmoud Messadi’s al-Sudd (The Barrier, 1940) has been called the first truly Tunisian play, an ambitious attempt to combine Muslim with contemporary existentialist thought and a visionary hero who has been compared with Ibsen’s Brand. Tunisian playwrighting developed rapidly during the next decade, much of it either historical plays dealing with Tunisia, the Maghreb, or Andalusia, or plays of social criticism in the Tunisian dialect. Both types of drama encouraged nationalist sentiments and contributed significantly to the stuggle against French colonialism of the early 1950s, culminating in violent resistance beginning in 1954 and independence in 1956. During these turbulent years, in 1953, Tunis founded the first municipally funded professional company in the country. The first significant Algerian man of the theatre was Salaali Ali, a director and actor, whose popular play Juha (1926) launched a wave of political dramas contributing to the struggle for independence. Significantly, it appeared the same year as the founding of the first Algerian political party dedicated to that cause, the Najm Shmall Afriqiya (Star of North Africa). That year also saw the return to Algeria from schooling in France of Rasheed Qasanteeni, the author of more than thirty popular plays, who has been called the “Father of the Algerian Theatre.” The following year another major pioneer, the actor-singer Maheddine Bachetarzi, produced his first of many plays. During the 1930s, Algiers became a significant theatre center, with well-established local companies and traveling troupes form Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco. In 1935, the Star of North Africa party sent a troupe to France to perform for immigrant communities, but it ran into trouble with French authorities, who feared it was enouraging Algerian nationalism. The 1940s and 1950s saw a growing consolidation of theatre throughout the Maghreb, despite the violent upheavals in Algeria, in which theatre artists were often deeply involved. After deadly clashes with freedom-seeking demonstrators in 1945, the French occupation of Algeria became more repressive, although the colonial authorities sought some conciliation by establishing the Algerian Theatre Company at the Algiers Municipal Opera House in 1947, with Maheddine Bachetarzi as its director. Not surprisingly, however, funding was cut off within a year, out of concern for the political content of much of the work offered. Plays of social commentary were very popular, as were historical dramas such as Ahmed Tufeeq al-Madani’s 1948 Hannibal, since these allowed political commentary under the guise of historical distance. Revolutionary sentiments were more and more openly expressed in the theatre until the actual outbreak of the revolution in 1956. Two years later, as the revolution continued, Mutafa Kaatib, who had served as deputy to Bachetarzi in the Algerian Theatre Company, established in recently independent Tunisia an Algerian company in exile called the National Liberation Front Arts Company. Prior to this time they had been based for three years in Paris. This company became the theatrical voice of Algerian independence, encouraging revolutionary plays with which it toured to such sympathetic countries as China, Russia, Libya, Morocco, and Iraq. Its most dedicated revolutionary dramatist was Abd ul-Haleem, but surely the best-known dramatist encouraged by this company was Katib Yacine. Although the NLF performed in either classical Arabic or the Algerian dialect, many of the plays they presented were originally written in French and translated. Yacine is a central example of this. Yacine’s native language is the Berber Tamazight, a language that would not allow either publication nor dissemination of his work. Thus, like his fellow Tamazight playwright Mouloud Mammeri, he has chosen French as his language of literary creation. Both authors have subsequently been translated in colloquial Arabic for production by the NLF and others. The long Algerian War of Independence finally concluded in March of 1962. The following January, a decree from the new Algerian government established an Algerian National Theatre and organized theatrical activities throughout the country. The NLF theatre returned from exile to become this National Theatre. Its productions and the many festivals it organized dominated theatrical culture in Algeria for the next decade and a half, although in the late 1970s, the government strongly encouraged theatrical decentralization, giving strong support to the regional theatres in Oran, Anna, Constantine, and Sidi-bel-Abbas. The figure most associated with this movement is one of the leading dramatists of modern Algeria, Abdelkader Alloula, whose play The Veil appears in this volume. Alloula, born in 1929 in a small village near Oran, studied theatre with Jean Vilar in Paris from 1960 to 1962, but returned to Algeria when independence was declared and joined the newly formed National Theatre there, first as an actor, then as a director, and eventually, as an adaptor and playwright. When attention shifted to regional theatre, he became director of the Regional Theatre of Oran, where he gained his first major success directing his own play El Khozea (Bread). After three years as director in Oran, Alloula was invited to direct the National Theatre in Tunis, but he had disagreements with the ministerial authorities there and returned to Oran, where he remained as director until his assassination by a religious fundamentalist in March of 1994. It was during this second administration in Oran that he created his best-known work, a trilogy of socially engaged dramas that are collectively known as The Generous Trilogy, from the title of the middle play, Les Généreux (Al-Ajwad, 1984) meaning “The Good People” or “The Generous Ones.” The series began in 1980 with Les Dires (Al-Agwal, The Sayings) and concluded with the play translated for this volume, Le Voile (Al-Lithem, The Veil). Although a few names recur in the plays, they present quite separate stories, all concerned with the tribulations of “the good people” in a corrupt and repressive society. The use of songs, narrative, and episodic structure will doubtlessly suggest Brecht to a Western reader, and the German dramatist was certainly among Alloula’s models, but equally important was the storytelling tradition and conventions of his native country. Since his death, Alloula’s reputation has steadily grown both in Algeria and France, and one of the major events of “Djazair 2003,” a year-long celebration of Algerian culture in France, was a national tour of a company of young actors from Oran performing Alloula’s The Veil. The following year, the tenth anniversary of his assassination, his plays and career were celebrated throughout Algeria and France. The other Algerian dramatist represented in this volume, Fatima Gallaire, has a much different background, though like Alloula, she was born in 1944 in a small village, near the city of Constantine. She grew up in Algeria, but in 1967, frustrated by the misogynist attitudes that she had found first in her home community and then as a student at the University of Algiers, she departed for France, where, except for a few years in the early 1970s, she has lived since, marrying a Frenchman in 1980. She first created for the cinema, but turned to theatre in 1985 with a powerful first play about a fatal tension between traditional culture and modernism among Algerian women, Ah, vous êtes venus là où il y a quelques tombes (Ah, You Have Come to Where There Are Tombs). Co-épouses (Co-Spouses), which appears in this volume, was her second play, published in 1992. Although much lighter in tone, it deals with an equally serious social question, the tensions within a polygamous household. Despite Gallaire’s exile, her plays all deal in some way with her homeland, and many are set there. She has always been centrally interested in women’s issues, and the continuing oppression of women in Algeria has provided inspiration for much of her work. Traditional Algerian culture had been strongly repressed during the years of French rule, and was not surprisingly strongly reasserted after independence. Unfortunately, for Algerian women, this often meant a strong emphasis upon highly conservative Islamic social and religious beliefs. In 1984, a Family Code was passed, forbidding marriage between a Muslim woman and a non-Muslim man and allowing polygamy, both of which have inspired plays by Gallaire. The new constitution of 1988 dropped all references to the rights of women. In the early 1990s, the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front made major electoral gains, threatening a further erosion in the situation of women. A military takeover and guerilla warfare marked the next decade, and stability was still not totally restored at the beginning of the new century. During this turbulent period, Gallaire was denied permission to return to her homeland, although she did set up a fruitful collaboration with academic and cultural colleagues in Morocco and made several trips there. Finally, in 1999, she was granted a visa to visit her family and home. The author to date of more than thirty plays, more than twenty novels, a number of films, poems and other writings, and the recipient of a number of major French literary awards, among them the Arletty Prize in 1990 and the AMIC Prize from the French Academy in 1994, Gallaire is today one of the best-known writers from the Maghreb. In Tunisia, as in Algeria, independence was followed at first by strong governmental support of the arts. Under the ministerial leadership of Chedly Klibi, the arts in general and theatre in particular were encouraged by funding, construction of new facilities, and establishment of major festivals, most of which continue today. This “golden age” of modern Tunisian theatre lasted until the late 1970s, when decreased funding and increased censorship began to make theatrical production more difficult. The year 1982 saw a number of major developments, the establishment of the Tunisian National Theatre Company; the founding of the country’s first serious theatre journal, Fadha’aat Masrahiyya (Theatrical Areas); and the creation of the Carthage Theatre Days Festival, which has become a major international event. Even so, censorship has remained a serious problem for Tunisian theatres, and its pressures are felt in different ways in what a recent study has described as the three major types of theatre in Tunisia today. First are the official state-supported theatres, such as the TNT, that emphasize art and craft and avoid controversial material. Second are the groups such as the Gafsa Theatre Company (founded 1973) or the Théâtre Maghreb Arabe (founded 1974), that frequently challenge governmental positions and as a result either perform outside Tunisia or risk censorship or even imprisonment. A third group is the private theatres, more like experimental companies in Europe, but that generally avoid politically sensitive matters. Jalila Baccar, represented in this volume, has been a pioneer and leading figure in both the oppositional and private theatres. Born in Tunis in 1952, she attended the university there and was one of the founders of the Gafsa Theatre Company. She worked with a number of other groups before founding with her continuing partner, Fadhel Jaibi, the first private professional theatre in Tunisia, the Nouveau Théâtre, in 1976. Here she served as both leading actress and dramatist. Again with Jaibi, she established in 1994 her current group, Familia, which has gained a major international reputation, traveling first to Cairo, Beirut, and Damascus, then through much of Europe and as far as Argentina, Japan, and South Korea. They appeared at the Avignon Festival in 2002 and at the Berlin Festival in September of that same year, where three of their previous productions and three of their films were shown at various theatres and where Baccar and her company created Araberlin, the play included in this volume. Its theme is the difficulty of Arab immigrants living in a city like Berlin amid contemporary fears of Arab terrorism. In 2003 Araberlin won the annual award for outstanding Francophone drama given by the French Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques. Although Baccar, like almost all Tunisian dramatists, has had to negotiate often with governmental censorship, only her most recent drama, Corps-otages, has been actually banned for production at home, although it enjoyed a very successful performance at the Odéon in Paris, where it was the first Arabic play ever presented in that major theatre. Created in conjunction with the fiftieth anniversary of Tunisian independence, it looked back over that period and the many specific references to political figures and key events proved unacceptable to the Tunisian authorities. In an interview in the on-line Tunisian journal Kalima in October of 2006 Baccar urged the censor to relent, since her play was written “for Tunisians and should be seen by Tunisians.” The website itself however, remains blocked in Tunisia. Although Morocco has had a less substantial modern theatrical tradition than Algeria or Tunisia, and its dramatists have, like those in other parts of the Maghreb, had a somewhat uneasy relationship with state censors, on the whole dramatic expression has been rather less troubled there. The French protectorate established censorship in 1934, but as time passed, it became more tolerant of the developing Moroccan theatre, and in 1950 even provided a French theatre expert, André Voisin, to study and enourage theatre in that country. He remained for six years, traveling throughout Morocco, studying local performance traditions, and establishing workshops for theatre study. Many of the leading Moroccan theatre artists of the next generation were his students, among them Tayeb al- Saddiki, born in 1938, the best-known contemporary Moroccan dramatist, one of whose works appears in this collection. The first professional theatre in Morocco, al-Ma’moura, the National Theatre, was founded just before independence in 1954 and was Morocco’s leading encourager of young actors and dramatists until it lost the support of the Ministry of Cultural Affairs and was forced to close in 1974. A core of its actors then founded the Troupe du Théâtre National, which took up residence at the Théâtre Mohamed V in Rabat, where it performs today. Saddiki, who had founded a successful alternative troupe, the People’s Theatre, in 1961, was invited to serve as artistic director, but, always an independent spirit, he found this position too restrictive and left to form his own theatre in Casablanca, where he is still located. Saddiki, although he studied theatre with Jean Vilar in France, began his career as a designer and architect. He is well known as both a painter and a calligrapher, an actor and director, and a designer of scenery for theatre and cinema. He is best known throughout the Arab world, however, as a playwright, the author of some fifty original works and adaptations in both Arabic and French. Among the European authors he has translated into Arabic are Molière, Aristophanes, Goldoni, Ben Johnson, Marivaux, Gogol, Ionesco, and Beckett. His interest in Moroccan traditional performance is equally strong, however, and he has been a pioneer in developing interest in early performance texts and traditions. From the beginning of his career, Saddiki has had a special affection for and sympathy with Molière, who, he has remarked, is a Mediterranean author and thus much closer to the Moroccan spirit than a dramatist like Shakespeare, for example. Saddiki’s first adaptations were of the Molière farces Le Medecine Volant and Ja Jalousie du Barbouille, in 1955, and he continued to translate the French playwright and to present his works in the Mogador Theatre in Casablanca, where he was artistic director. In the mid-1990s, he wrote two original plays which featured Molière as a character, one simply named Molière, in 1992, and another with the more complicated title, Nous Sommes Faits pour Nous Entendre (We were Created to Understand Each Other), the following year. The first deals directly with Molière’s illness and death, focusing upon his struggles with his social and religious enemies whom Saddiki specifically likens to Arab fundamentalists who oppose the theatre in his own time. The second, which is included in this collection, deals with the visit of the first Moroccan ambassador to the court of Louis XIV and focuses less on intolerance and censorship and more on cultural conflict. As translator, I have taken the liberty of changing the title to the more lively The Folies Berbers, a pun from the play itself. Here then is offered a wide-ranging selection of dramas by some of the leading dramatists from this section of the world. It is a small sampling of the riches available, but it may, we hope, encourage those interested in the theatre to look further into the fascinating experiments and achievements of the Maghreb dramatic tradition. |